Monday, May 2, 2011

Central Arkansas Library System Five Year Anniversary!

You may know them as the Encyclopedia of Arkansas, where I personally had two entries (thanks to The Greats and other sources) on KTHS and KAAY. I just received information of their anniversary:

"Hello everyone. Can you believe that the Encyclopedia of Arkansas History & Culture is five years old? Neither can I. It seems like just yesterday that the staff was sitting around a computer with their fingers crossed, hoping that the site wouldn't crash when it launched.

During its first month of operation, the EOA received 46,960 visits. In April 2011, the site received 239,655 visits. Since the site launch, it has had 105,032,153 hits-that's right, more than 105 million hits. The response to the encyclopedia has been dramatically larger than we ever envisioned. I hope you are as proud of the EOA as we are.

I always say that the EOA is my first-born child. Today, I'm writing to you (its godparents) to say that baby needs a new pair of shoes...and a college fund.

We are getting ready to go after grant money to do a major expansion of the EOA website, and we need a pool of matching funds for these grant applications. As part of the expansion, we want to create a mobile version of the website for smart phones and other mobile devices and launch an application that will work with GPS-enabled devices to locate county-specific information-this new technology will allow a user standing anywhere in Newton County, for example, to easily see all entries and media related to that county. We hope that this new technology will be as well received as the original EOA website, and that it will help to launch or supplement local efforts to encourage heritage tourism and education.

Please consider making a gift to the EOA in honor of five successful years of making Arkansas-history information readily available to the public.

The Butler Center for Arkansas Studies, a department of the Central Arkansas Library System, is located in the Arkansas Studies Institute on the campus of the Main Library. For more information visit, www.butlercenter.org. All events are free and open to the public.)

When I was on vacation in Little Rock a couple of weeks ago, we (The Greats and I) were able to donate some more materials when we visited the Butler Center for Arkansas Studies. When the folks there saw some of the items, they were obviously in awe. I hope that we as a blog and as individuals can continue to donate materials and information to them for a long time to come.

If you feel led to donate, please do so! As mentioned above, donations are tax deductable. Thank you!

1 comment:

Hi Bud!Thanks so much for your visit, it was such a blast! We love to have visitors to the building, whether you're looking for fantastic art for sale by Arkansan artists and rotating art exhibits in the first floor galleries, looking to do genealogy studies or research in our second floor Butler Center or just curious to see the teams of the Encyclopedia of Arkansas and the Oxford American magazine hard at work on the third floor! Come out and see us in the ASI (Arkansas Studies Institute) Building right next door to the downtown public Main Library and just across the street from River Market!